External Hard Drive Missing After Big Sur Download

i am facing the same issue on my mac book air (2017) edition , i have a 1.5tb WD hardisk and it works so slow after i installed Big sur , the partitions on my disk loads after 15 minutes and the data transfer and accessibility is also very slow , i tried the same hardisk on my windows laptop and it works flawlessly . if you do find a solution pls share it here

Unbelievable!! I just bought a brand NEW MBP and suffered the same problem, after wasting an ENTIRE day trying to figure out the same issue (I have 6 EHD) by Seagate, and they claim (rightly so) that its Apple's problem, and noticing that a lot of my software won't install on the new MBP (recognized on two other windows machines and an older MAC, Ive decided to reset the entire BRAND NEW $1500 piece of junk and send it back to Best Buy. NEVER AGAIN! will I ever buy another Mac, you proved to me once and for all that you don't deserve my loyalty, and not only that, I was planning on getting the DESKTOP PRO $6k and am now looking to get rid of my iPhone. This is unbelievable no assistance from Apple and the Geeksquad said that its a kernel issue with APPLE since 5 years ago, and they don't know how to fix it!. If i wanted an expensive surfing machine, I might as well get a Surface Book Pro, if thats all Apples products are good for, at least Windows 10 will RECOGNIZE EHDs and download software. Steve Jobs is probably shaking his head at what this company has become. Lost all credibility

Booster, sorry to hear your issues. I purchased a 2020 iMac and I'm not having any issues with external hard drives. I would agree that Apple needs to do a better job of the updates in relation to Big Sur.

I have a Macbook Pro 15" 2019. My LaCie Drive worked fine with Big Sur 11 but when I updated to 11.1 it is no longer appearing. I have the External Drives Checked in preferences. Any help would be appreciated.

When using the Disk Utility, it showed up as an external drive but was listed as unmounted. There is no external power supply. The lights flash on the unit and you can feel it active. (They I had to do a work item, so there was a time delay) Then a message appeared. "MacOS can't repair the disk "LaCie". You can still open or copy files on the disk, but you can't save any changes to the files on the disk. Backup up the disk and reformat it as soon as you can. "

I don't know how the unit was formatted originally, I just used as it was. Bought it in October 2019.

So I can see my files thankfully, but I need to keep them and not reformat the drive. Should I use the First Aid? Do you have any other suggestions?

Thanks for your help,

Irene

I'm not sure First Aid will help. Since you can see it in Disk Utility, in the image below can you select the drive as I have and then tell me the partition information? Since the drive is unmounted I'm not sure if it will show you anything. A drive could go bad in a couple of months but that doesn't usually happen.

Unplug the mac? really? I know coding, and its not a power issue my friend, its a kernel issue. The plug n play of MBP's with EHD's hasn't been highlighted by Apple OSX core development teams. Or if they have knowledge, they were probably under duress to implement temporary fixes until they can figure out a root fix or patch to the update.

If by reboot you mean simply restarting or turning it off and on again, that didnt work for me. I tried both those approaches.

Maybe if you unplug the iMac for a while it lets the system know to reset something, it could be a hardware thing as well. Idk how the guys at Apple do things now. Anyways that’s all I got, I don’t know much about computers.

This isn't my first rodeo with this problem, so I already had ticked all of the settings in preferences to make the external hard drives appear prior to upgrading to Big Sur. Right now, I'm able to see my 1 TB WD Elements hard drive and access it's files, but my Seagate 4TB expansion drive will not mount when I got into Disk Utility. It's really too bad because I've been using that drive for my local Time Machine backup.

Argh! Did you do anything at all? I can't seem to find any answers for Big Sur from Seagate.

It shows up in Disk Utility, repairs fine, but still won't show up on my desktop.

I'd rather not erase everything, since it's there ... is there any updates on what to do?

I've updated to Big Sur 11.1 on my MacBook Pro. When I use an external hard drive (ie Seagate 2T USB3) which I use for Time Machine backups, or any other thumb drive, they appear as an icon on my desktop but do not show up in my list on Finder. I've ensured my Finder preferences are set to display CDs, DVDs, iPods, External disks and Hard disks and they are all checked. Yet Finder does not display them. On my MacBook Air which is still running Catalina, these devices all show up as they should in Finder. The Finder settings between both macs are the same. Any help is appreciated.

That is not the answer either. You are ignoring the fact that there was no such problem until Big Sur came out. That invalidates what you are suggesting is the problem and the fix. Tuxera products are all commercial grade software packages and are not designed for individual use.

NTFS formatting is not in use by me or probably several others discussing their problem. That again indicates it is not the problem and Tuxera is not a solution. It is a MacOS problem.

With all due respect, what you suggest is not a solution and in view of the facts we are sharing here I wonder why you are suggesting it is.

I am wondering what it will take for Apple to acknowledge Big Sur broke this and fix it. It would be nice to have them say they are aware of the issue and investigating. Let us know someone hears us.

I just can't imagine this is a complex fix. The issue is in talked about in five or six threads here and even more on the many non-Apple discussion boards.

This is a major whiff by Apple.

I just got off a support chat session. Laborious trudge through write privileges, etc..

We ended up with "try an smc reset" ... and now the Seagate drive is not detected at all.

At least I used to have read access. Now will have to take this somewhere to get the data off of it.

Hard to imagine that it is not a known bug, given this thread and all the unresolved support cases.

At some level of management you (Apple) made a trade-off decision to let this ride.

Smacks of what happened with the iPhone battery/performance degradation case of a few years ago. And based on my support interaction, "they" have not even documented for their front line and second level support pros. Guess it's cheaper (in a high level sense) to pay their wages and have users annoyed than to fix this

I am sure that there is a license term that absolves Apple/Them of responsibility for damages.

But the 'gentle-persons agreement' with those of us who depend on Apple for nearly all our devices has sure been violated.

Anybody out there?

Mysterious time consuming time waste. I do not know why my new external HD reader suddenly performed after I installed the update yesterday, but I do know that it was reading on my Catalina Pro and I could not find it at all on the Air running BigSur until after the upgrade. Still this is not my backup and I haven't checked that yet.

Of course I still might uninstall BigSur. There are too many quirks in visuals and software functioning. My documents now open behind my chrome screen. My clock disappeared from top bar. `Docs in Finder end up behind the window. My minimize tab will only take the Chrome screen to the bottom of the page -- I can no longer split that screen as before. I anticipate finding more quirks as time goes on. Do not have time to look for fixes at this point I have spent over ten hours on BigSur issues.The two click spell check (control plus touchpad) is the most time consuming as I am an editor. Basta.